Coming Home
by harliesue
Summary: After her fall, Amelie has spent a few years doing undercover assignments for Mycroft, cut off from her newly established (and heartbroken) family. But when she comes back, everything is completely different. Sequel to "Finding a Home."


**So, after months of promise, we've finally got progress. This is the first of many chapters to come and oh my goodness I am hella excited. PLEASE BE KIND IT HAS BEEN AWHILE AND I AM REALLY SORRY TO MY VETERAN READERS FOR TAKING SO LONG. Anyways, HELLO! I hope you all have a good time reading.**

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Places that are meant to hum with the footsteps and breaths and voices of strangers walking in step along the sides of other strangers are the worst places to be when all of those people are no longer there. They become melancholy with their abandonment and ensure that whatever unfortunate soul remains won't be lonely as their every action is amplified enough to continue existence as ghostly echoes travelling with this inexplicably upsetting case of a human being.

First thing first, lucid dreams are really weird. I get to think separately from myself and take my own actions, but I am still relatively unconscious and in an airport. Right now, dream me is sitting in a row of chairs lined up against a window that opens up the room to gray skies. It's just me. It's really weird, but I think I've established that already. I think I remember it, but I've been to so many airports these past few years, I've no idea if it is entirely special or not.

Second thing second (I do not _care_ if that's bad grammar, I will say it all the same), I am not in me. I mean, me is sitting in a chair. I, however, am watching from some immaterial place and I can't control anything that Chair Amelie is doing. If I could, I'd get her up from there and have her ransack the Starbucks that I am certain is down the hall. Instead, I have to watch her (me), stare morosely at her hands and do nothing.

I would wake up if I knew how.

Floating around got boring, so now I am sitting next to me and trying a little interaction. It doesn't work, unsurprisingly.

Right when I stopped assailing her (my) shins with my ghost feet, she turned to look at me and I swear on all my band tees, her eyes were black pits of all the levels of Hell and I may or may not have screamed (I did. I really did.).

Third thing third. One thing lonelier than being in an empty airport is waking up to tangled bed sheets and a choking sweat without anyone to be there to tell you it is going to be okay. I would have preferred the airport if I'm being honest.

I don't have to look at the clock resting on my bed stand to know it's more than a bit premature to be awake. It's that time where it's too early for the moon to still hang in the dark expanse over our heads, but not late enough for the sun to inch over the horizon in an explosion of light and color that's been put in slow motion.

Staying up isn't an option. I've got work to do in the morning and enough of it to require at least eight hours of sleep. I roll over on my side, hand twisted into the rumpled sheet in front of me and I recite the Periodic Table of Elements enough times, so that when I finally find my familiar darkness, I've gotten to a rational state once more. Calm, collected… "_It's all just transport_."

Clear skies and comforting breezes are what I find when I start my nights with restlessness and that comes often enough that this part has become clockwork. I fall asleep and I wake up in a world where if I slightly turn my head to the left, I'll see familiar curls and eyes so kind that one can forget that they don't deserve such niceties. They're never looking at me when I come into this dream world. Instead, they stare up at the expanse of blue overhead, fluttering slightly with the first signs of drowsiness.

We never speak. I simply watch him and somehow it's enough. I think we don't say anything because I've forgotten just how his voice sounds and my unconscious self is doing me a favor and not reminding of that fact. One day I'll remember to thank my brain for it. For now, though, I'll just lay here watching the wind give brief moments of life to his hair and flannel shirt lapels.

Tonight, I can't help but try to reach out to simply touch him and his hand comes up and holds mine against his face. I whisper, "William," although, I hadn't meant for it to come out so choked. A smile just barely graces him, but I feel like it was his way of saying, "I know."

At some point, I look at the sky with him and we stay there in silence until the edges of my vision begin to darken and reality comes to wake me up.

It's funny because when I open my eyes and see a familiar white ceiling overhead, I realize life is clockwork, too. Legs swing over the side of the bed, fingers reach up to wipe away the last bits of sleep from them, hands push off the bed and feet slip into worn out house shoes so the bite from the cold tile doesn't worm its way into my bones again. My tongue feels thick and slimy, yet my gums and teeth feel dry and cracked; I should rinse out my mouth before coffee, but I can't seem to find the point right now.

If coffee is meant to fill me up, today it's doing a shit job, but I let the black liquid trickle down my throat, slither down my chest cavity and splash into the pit of my stomach; I still feel empty and hollow, even though the edge of hunger has receded. But it was the same hollow feeling that ate away at me since I had left London, the same feeling that clawed up my abdomen when Mycroft sent pictures of John or Sherlock (never them together though, don't know why, don't like it). Some might call it homesickness. I prefer to not call it anything.

The spasmodic vibration coming from my phone on the countertop gave me pause in my spiraling thoughts into a definite emotional slump. If I had bothered to put it back on sound, I wouldn't have to move to get it so I could find out who it was, but unfortunately, I did not, and now I have to shuffle across the kitchen floor to grab it.

It takes less than a second for me to see the name and start hitting the damned thing against my forehead in frustration (along with a line of quiet vulgarities that danced up and down the alphabet). Mycroft. Perfect. Awesome. Just who I wanted to talk to before I could even get dressed for the scouting assignment today.

I tried to hit accept, but my thumb had other ideas. Instead, I hovered over the little green icon until the screen went black and I had missed the call. Immediately, I turned it back on, ready to call him back, but my home screen made me stop again.

It was the one photo of Sherlock and John that I had of them together. I didn't take it myself, surveillance did, but that doesn't matter. It was a few months after I had "died" (long story short, I had thirteen possible ways to survive and we went with the most damaging one) and they were standing in front of 221B. My great consulting detective sat on the steps leading into the building with the good army doctor at his side. John had white flowers hanging in his hand that gained an awful lot of his attention, while Sherlock watched him carefully with a tilt of his head.

I know what the flowers are for, I could tell by the type of shoes he was wearing, but the one thing in the picture I will never be able to over analyze is the exact expressions they held; John's one of hesitation, Sherlock's one of adoration.

I always thought I would be there for their first date night and as Mycroft rings my phone again, interrupting my small pocket universe where I was on the steps with them, I realize that it has been far past the time I should truly be there.

Setting my phone down, the vibrations still rocking through it, I turn and find a bag to start putting my things in.

I'm going home.

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**Also, bit young on the dedications, but this sequel wouldn't have happened without the support of so many people and the persistence of one Corrin and another brilliant writer on here who deserves all the praises in this world, kazzyl. She got this to happen in the end and I don't know what this would be without her. Truly, I am so thrilled to start another adventure with you all and thank you.**

**-HS**


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